Salt Diary

The tide keeps a ledger no one audits, depositing its slow wealth of shells along the curve of what we called our beach, though it belonged to the herons first and the herons have not forgotten.

I found your handwriting in the sand once, already dissolving at the edges like a word you started to say at dinner then swallowed back with wine. The ocean took the consonants first.

There is a grammar to erosion: the cliff face parsed into particulate, the jetty's grammar of rust and barnacle, each piling a sentence the salt has been editing for decades.

We measure loss in waterlines, in the height of boots needed each October, in the distance between the cottage door and the first lick of foam. The journal shrinks but the entries grow heavier.

What the sea returns is never what the sea was given. A lighter. A smoothed cathedral of glass. The ordinary, transfigured by having been held under for so long.